Demolition Derby

By Richard Fortey

Published: August 9, 1998

LIFE IN THE BALANCE

Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis.

By Niles Eldredge.

Illustrated. 224 pp. Princeton, N.J.:

A Peter N. Nevraumont Book/

Princeton University Press. $24.95.

In the great days of coal mining it was the custom to take a canary down to the galleries. When the canary ceased singing and died, it was an indicator of poison in the atmosphere. The miners fled back to the fresh air. Now it is the frogs and salamanders that are dying. They are becoming rare around the ponds in the Adirondacks; they are even becoming extinct on remote oceanic islands. If this, like the miners' canary, is an indicator that all is not well, then there is nowhere for us to flee. Everywhere is in trouble.

It was not always like this. There was a time when our species lived in greater harmony with all others. Perhaps we all have our own ideas of this Garden of Eden. For me, it is a waterside meadow in the days before artificial fertilizers took their toll, a meadow alight with wildflowers and washed with birdsong. For Niles Eldredge, it is the Okavango Delta of Botswana. It is a scientifically justifiable choice, because the Okavango has a claim to be the true Eden, resembling as it does the environment in which our species evolved from its antecedents in the African genesis long ago. Eldredge is at his very best writing about this place. He is fervent in his respect for the complexities of its ecology. He rhapsodizes even about the termite, as he explains the little creature's role in recycling vegetation and in keeping the ecosystem healthy. The Okavango is a rich and unsullied habitat, and Eldredge sketches its food webs as having a complex interdependence worthy of a Faulkner family saga.

Yet in ''Life in the Balance,'' his writing is infused, too, with a sense of the Fall. For even in the Okavango there are changes. Climate is altering; savanna is making inroads. The warning of the salamander may reach as far as Eden. Just as the water meadow of my youth has become a grassy expanse as bland as a bowling green, so there is hardly any part of the world that has avoided degradation. For now manunkind (as E. E. Cummings called him) carries destruction of habitat and extinction of species to every wilderness. Eldredge calls this ''the sixth extinction,'' thereby putting our species' depredations on a par with other great catastrophes that have punctuated earth's 3.5 billion years of biological history. The one before the sixth terminated the dinosaurs.

His jeremiad is controversial because extinction is hard to estimate. All biologists agree that the tropical rain forest is both the most fragile habitat and the one richest in species. But we don't even know how many species there are. There are surely thousands upon thousands still unnamed. If they die out, they will die unmourned, lacking even an epitaph -- the biological equivalent of an unmarked grave.

We infer that these hordes of unnamed species are there because random samples taken from forest canopies are rich in unknown types of beetles and moths. Even dredges taken from the deep-sea floor have proved cornucopias of unsuspected biodiversity: strange shrimps and worms abound. So many forms are still unnamed because -- despite rhetorical government support -- there are pathetically few scientists paid to describe them. Taxonomists don't get major research grants; there are rarely jobs for them, and virtually none in the third world, where they are most needed. Namers of species sometimes feel like archeologists documenting wonders that are about to be engulfed by demolition. E. O. Wilson famously declared that 27,000 species are becoming extinct every year. A mere 40,000 species are employed in the life of humans: who knows what has been lost already that might have proved of use to us for drugs, food or just for our pleasure?

All biologists I know grieve for the loss of a species, even one as obscure as a tropical land snail, the last individual of which expired a year ago in the hand of one of the few specialists who could recognize it for what it was. The problem is that somehow this concern has to be spread throughout mankind. I know people whose connection to the natural world has been so atrophied that they would happily see asphalt laid from one end of the land to the other. Many more, perfectly good-hearted, believe that the richness of nature resembles a well-tended golf course. On the contrary, in temperate climates we need tolerance of messy, weedy corners. We have to cure suburbanites of their passion for ''tidying up.'' Eldredge movingly describes how a neglected corner of Chicago has regenerated a postage-stamp morsel of prairie. Natural ecology has a memory longer than human cupidity.

In the tropical rain forests the situation is both worse and more delicate. With some justice, the local governments resent finger wagging from Western ecologists, especially since men in suits from the same Western countries are offering them good cash for their wood or animal products. Eldredge tells an illuminating story of being sold rare tenrecs in Madagascar by children, and sneaking up the road to release them again into the wild. Who is in the right in this case? We all know of the greed that is destroying great tracts of Indonesia; a colleague of mine discovered that a species of fish used as a staple item of diet was not even a named species. It may be doomed even before its ecological needs are known. Clearly this is a global scandal, but can the tribesman be blamed for reaching for the last fat fish, and can a hungry child be expected to lament the passing of a salamander?

The story of man's dominion over nature and his subsequent abuse of power cannot be told too often, and Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has provided one of the most succinct accounts yet. The problem is that it is hard to know who is listening: people are too busy mining the seam to heed the death of the canary. Politicians are mostly not evil, but political expediency has already allowed them to squander the fisheries, collude in the destruction of rain forest, fail to prevent erosion in the Himalayas and exhibit dismal feebleness in the face of the supposed inexorability of markets. President Clinton's hand still hovers over the signature that might commit him to expensive pollution reduction. The Australians have even won concessions to increase greenhouse emissions. Eldredge's list of what we must all learn is sensible and biologically informed. But we will probably go on nudging other inhabitants of our planet into oblivion until the stench of our own pollution forces us to realize that it is already too late.

Richard Fortey is the author of ''Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth.''